Helps reactivate dormant follicles
Promotes regrowth by stimulating scalp blood flow
Protect from theft / loss / damage
Extremely limited stock
The Meno Club
Home
>
Women's Health
>
Hair & Hormones
AN EXPERT COLUMN · HAIR & HORMONES
By Dr. Patricia Sullivan, MD · Seventeen years in practice
How 100,000+ women fixed their hair by stopping with “repair” products
Most weeks I sit across from at least one woman who apologizes for her hair.
She'll call it frizz, or damage, or she'll tell me she's been “lazy” with her masks. And then she describes the same morning I've heard a few hundred times by now.
The short hair at her crown that she smooths down before work. The brush that catches where it never used to. The little broken pieces she wipes off the bathroom sink, an inch long, two inches, every single day.
By the time she's in my office, she has done everything right. The bond builder every stylist recommends. A repair mask on Sundays. A silk pillowcase, less heat, air drying when she has the time.
And the breakage keeps coming.
Almost every one of them says the same sentence: I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. Most have already asked someone and been told it's normal for their age, which is true… But also completely useless to her.
Then I ask the question I always ask. “Has anyone ever looked at why your hair is breaking, instead of how you’re trying to repair it?”
Because when you look at one of those broken hairs up close, it tells a very clear story, and it's not something shampoos or hair masks can fix.
Your hair isn't breaking because the hair is damaged. It's breaking because the follicle that built it has shrunk, so the hair it grows today is thinner than the hair that grew out of it 5 years ago. Thin enough that it snaps under its own weight.
That's why nothing you’ve tried has worked. You’ve been treating the wrong end of the hair.
Every New Hair Is Coming In a Little Thinner Than the Last
Somewhere in your early forties, sometimes your late thirties, your estrogen starts to decline. That stretch has a name, perimenopause, and it runs for years before anyone says the word menopause. And it doesn't stop when your periods do, which is why women in their late fifties tell me their hair is still changing.
Most women know estrogen affects mood, sleep, and skin. What rarely comes up at that first doctor's visit is what estrogen was doing for your hair.
It was standing guard.
You've probably read the word DHT by now. What almost nobody gets told is why it left your hair alone for forty years and then didn't.
Estrogen was keeping it off the follicle. Think of it as a shield. You've been making DHT from your own testosterone since you were a teenager, and the whole time, the shield was holding it back.
When estrogen drops, the shield comes down with it.
And DHT, which was always there, starts reaching the follicle. It binds, and the follicle shrinks a little. Then a little more the next time it builds a hair.
We call that miniaturization, which just means every new hair comes in a little finer than the one before it.
Estrogen drops, the shield comes down, and DHT reaches the follicle. From there it's the same thing over and over: each cycle builds a hair a little finer than the last, until one comes out too thin to hold its own weight.
A healthy strand bends. A strand that thin just breaks.
Not every woman finds this on her sink. Some tell me the part looks wider in photographs, or the ponytail feels thinner in her hand than it used to. It's the same thing happening in the same follicle, just further along. Breakage tends to show up first, because it leaves something behind for you to find.
Once you see that, her whole morning turns out to be one problem instead of four.
Fine hair grabs onto itself, so it tangles and knots the way it never used to, and the brush catches. It reflects less light, so it looks dull no matter what she puts on it. And it can't hold its own length, so it snaps and the pieces end up on the sink.
You can see it on a single hair. Pick up one of the broken pieces and look at the tip. That tiny white dot is the break point. Most women assume split end, or heat. It's neither.
Everything on your shelf is aimed at hair you’ve already grown. But your follicles decided how healthy that hair would be, long before it reached your brush.
I Started Testing What My Patients Were Using
A few years ago I started asking my patients to bring it all in.
Not to tell me what they used. The actual bag, on the desk. And I asked one question of every product in it: does anything in here do anything about DHT? I went through ingredient lists for weeks. The answer, over and over, was no.
What I found made me angry, and not because the science wasn't there. It has been sitting in journals for years. Because nobody had bothered to look.
So let me show you what was in those bags. And what should have been.
Your Bond Builder Is Repairing Bonds That Were Never Broken
Start with the bond builders, because that's where almost every woman starts. They're real chemistry. If bleach snapped the bonds inside your strands, they do exactly what the bottle says. That's why you trust them.
But they work on hair that has already left the follicle. A miniaturized strand has no snapped bonds to repair. It's built too fine, and nothing you put on a finished hair changes what it was built with. It's like ironing a shirt that’s two sizes too small.
Then the pile that sits right next to it in the bag. Biotin, collagen, the gummies, the $90-a-month blends. Biotin deficiency is genuinely rare in adult women, which is why "I took it for a year and nothing happened" is the most common sentence I hear about it. Your follicles aren't short on food. They're under pressure from a hormone, and no vitamin changes that.
DID YOU KNOW
A typical hair gummy gives you over 150 times what your body actually needs. The FDA had to issue a warning in 2017, not because it hurts your hair, but because that much biotin distorts blood test results. It changes what your labs say. Not what grows.
The "DHT Blocking" Shampoo Is in the Drain in Three Minutes
This one has the right word right there on the front of the bottle. That's what she's paying for. Look at what it can actually do, though. It's on your scalp for about three minutes and then it's in the drain. Your body makes DHT on the inside, around the clock, and delivers it to the follicle through your blood. Three minutes of lather on the outside doesn't reach any of that.
And the root sprays and fibers in the side pocket aren't trying to fix anything. They're makeup for a hormonal problem.
The Short Hairs That Never Get Long
A woman pulls her part open with two fingers and points at the short hairs standing straight up at her crown. Then she asks the question I could set my watch by. "Is this new growth, or is it breaking off?"
For most women in that chair, the honest answer is both. Those short hairs are real new growth. Her follicles are still producing. But each cycle builds a weaker strand than the one before, and a strand that fine meets the world the moment it clears the scalp. It gets brushed, slept on, tied back, caught in the wind. Somewhere in there it snaps, an inch or two from the scalp, and the follicle starts over.
So the wisps stay wisps. Not because nothing is growing, but because nothing survives long enough to count.
She'd already done everything she was told. Silk pillowcase, heat turned down, no tight ponytails. None of it helped, because a strand that fine is going to break somewhere no matter how carefully she handles it.
And here's the thing that settles it. The hair at the back of your head, low down above your neck, gets washed in the same shower, brushed with the same brush, slept on the same pillow. It isn't thinning and it isn't snapping.
Those follicles don't respond to DHT, which is why a surgeon doing a hair transplant takes hair from the back and moves it to the front.
Your part is where the hormone reaches. Nowhere else.
Half an inch a month. Snapping off at an inch, then again at an inch, for four years. She has never once seen what that hair would have looked like if it had been allowed to keep going. There's one more thing in that bag, and it's the only one that came from a doctor.
Minoxidil Was Never Aimed at DHT
It works on the blood vessels at the scalp, not on the hormone. DHT keeps shrinking the follicle underneath whatever shows up on top, and if you stop, you lose what it gave you.
It also comes with two things women aren't always warned about. Hair showing up on the face, which is the side effect women tell me they can't live with. And a shedding phase at the start that scares people into quitting before they find out whether it works.
Lay the whole bag out and the pattern is hard to unsee. Everything is working next to the problem.
Two Compounds Do What Nothing in That Bag Did
A real answer has to do three things. Slow down how much DHT your body makes, stop what's already made from landing on the follicle, and give the follicle back some of the estrogen signal it lost when the shield came down.
Two compounds cover all three, and both have to be swallowed, because DHT is made inside your body and carried to the follicle in your blood. Nothing you rub on the outside gets near it.
Pumpkin seed oil slows down the enzyme that turns your testosterone into DHT, so less of it gets made in the first place.
It's been tested on women with this exact kind of thinning. Sixty of them, three months, up against the standard 5% topical that doctors prescribe. It held its own. And in a seperate 24-week placebo-controlled trial, the group taking pumpkin seed oil grew 40% more hair. The placebo group grew 10%.
Pumpkin Seed Oil
40%
Placebo
10%
24-week placebo-controlled trial, hair count, male cohort (Cho 2014).
Slows the enzyme that makes DHT
+40% hair count vs 10% placebo
Cold-pressed, phytosterols intact
It does one more thing, and in perimenopause it might be the part that matters most. It contains plant compounds that act a little like estrogen in the body. That's the same shield that came down. It's also why I don't send women to saw palmetto on its own.
Saw palmetto handles the half pumpkin seed oil can't. Slowing production still leaves the DHT already in your blood, arriving at your follicles today. Saw palmetto competes for the receptor DHT needs, like a key already sitting in the lock.
In one study, women took it for six months. 83% ended up with more density, and 93% were losing less hair.
Competes at the DHT receptor
83% more density, 93% less hair loss at 6 months
Concentrated fruit extract, dosed for women
The study I keep coming back to gave women both compounds together, by mouth. Every woman in it was already using minoxidil, and it hadn't got them where they wanted to be. The ones who added these two on top ended up ahead of the ones who stayed on the drug alone.
Which is what you'd expect. The drug was working on the surface the whole time. It was never working on the hormone.
Taken by mouth
Female cohort
Outperformed the drug alone
Almost Nothing on the Shelf Gets Both Right
So this should be simple. Order both, take them, done. That's what I thought too, until I started reading labels the way I read studies, and I understood why so many women had told me "I tried pumpkin seed oil and nothing happened."
Some capsules are made from ground roasted seed powder, and the roasting burns off the compounds that do the work. Plenty of brands cold-press it properly and say so on the label.
Saw palmetto is where it falls apart. Most of it is dried berry powder, which carries almost none of the active part. When one lab put 28 saw palmetto products up against the pharmaceutical standard, one passed.
That's also what's in the expensive hair blends. They put saw palmetto on the label, which is more than most of the category does, but it's a fraction of the dose in the cheap form. Which is why women tell me they got six decent months and then nothing.
I couldn't keep explaining this one patient at a time and then sending her off to gamble on a label. So I joined a small team of women who had lived this themselves, and we built the formula I'd been describing in my office for years. It's called Bloom & Bond.
The whole label is two lines long. 2,000mg of cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil, the form that keeps the compounds that do the work. And 200mg of saw palmetto from a concentrated fruit extract, dosed for a woman's hair instead of borrowed from a men's prostate formula.
No fillers, no proprietary blends. And every batch goes to an outside lab before it ships, because if there's a number on the front of a bottle, you should be able to check it's actually in there.
And the dose isn't a guess. Two grams a day is what researchers gave thirty-five postmenopausal women to find out what pumpkin seed oil does in a woman's body. That's what's in two softgels, taken with breakfast, because the fat in a meal helps the oil absorb.
DID YOU KNOW
One thing women ask about, given what minoxidil does: this won't put hair on your face. It isn't pushing growth at the surface. It's working on the hormone.
If you take a blood thinner, hormonal medication, blood pressure or diabetes medication, or you're being treated for anything hormone-sensitive, ask your doctor first. Beyond that it isn't a medication and it doesn't behave like one. There's no dependency, and if you stop, the new growth you've gained stays yours.
Three bottles is a three-month supply, which works out to 64 cents a day. Less than most women were already spending on the products that weren't aimed at any of this.
What the First 90 Days Actually Look Like
A follicle runs on a roughly 90-day cycle.
So week one feels like nothing, and that's normal. But here’s what happens when you protect your follicles from DHT damage for 90 days straight:
Weeks 1-4by Sep 13
Fewer broken pieces to wipe away, and the brush starts moving through without catching. By the end of the first month the pillowcase and the drain come up nearly clear, which is the one most women mention first.
Weeks 5-8by Oct 11
The short hairs at your crown are still there, but they're not snapping off at an inch and starting over anymore. They're getting longer. Along the hairline, most women start spotting new baby hairs as well.
Weeks 9-12+by Nov 8
The new growth adds up to something you can feel. A ponytail with more in it, more volume when you style it, and styling that holds. This is usually when someone else notices before you've said anything.
Every woman's timeline is her own, which is why I ask everyone for the full 90 days before judging anything.
45,000 Women, and the Clinicians Who Started Asking Questions
I didn't expect my colleagues to pay attention. Medicine is conservative, and supplements have earned most of the skepticism they get. Then the results started showing up in other people's practices, and Then the results started showing up in other people's practices. Women who had been told to accept it came back with regrowth their own doctors hadn't expected. More than 45,000 women take the formula now.
Dr. Rebecca Chen, MD
Certified Trichologist & Hair Loss Specialist
"Hormonal thinning in women starts at the follicle, and the compounds with the most research behind them are the ones that work on DHT rather than on the hair itself. For women who don't want a prescription, pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto are the two I look at first."
But the messages I trust most come from the women themselves. These are individual experiences, not a promise of how this goes for you.
Real Women. Real Solutions.
Your Next Growth Cycle Is a Decision
Right now, while you've been reading this, your follicles are preparing the next round of hair. What decides how that round comes in is whether DHT is still sitting there when the building starts.
Every cycle that runs unprotected comes in a little finer than the one before. It's slow enough that you don't catch it happening, and it doesn't turn around on its own.
And this matters most for the women who assume they're past the point where it helps. Follicles don't die of age. They shrink under hormonal pressure, and a shrunken follicle can still answer. I've watched women in their fifties and sixties get new growth once that pressure came off.
And I want to be clear about what coming back actually looks like, because it isn't a before and after photo. It's the morning you rinse the conditioner out and don't stop to clear the drain first. It's not counting what came out in the brush, because you stopped counting weeks ago without deciding to.
The ones that have been under pressure longest are the slowest to come back. That's the only reason I tell women not to give this another year.
READER DISCOUNT
Save 59% on Bloom & Bond
2,000mg cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil and 200mg saw palmetto, in the forms the research used, at doses built for women. Three bottles is a full three-month supply, one complete follicle cycle.
€58,00
normally €140,00
Save 59%
Save 59%
90-day guarantee
Free shipping
READER DISCOUNT
Save 59% on Bloom & Bond
2,000mg cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil and 200mg saw palmetto, in the forms the research used, at doses built for women. Three bottles is a full three-month supply, one complete follicle cycle.
€58,00
normally €140,00
Save 59%
Save 59%
90-day guarantee
Free shipping
P.S. Every week you wait is another cycle running unprotected, and the 90-day clock only starts the day you order.
P.P.S. Between the discount and the guarantee, you have nothing to lose but the hair you're already losing.
